Ship of Theseus

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
21

This is no really a paradox but an observation; a metaphor, on the reality of growth and decay.

Each of us is a Ship of Theseus.
By the time we reach adulthood there is not a single atom in your body that you had when you were born. Cells are continually sloughing off, and being replaced, Bone are in a continual state of deposition and decay. Osteoblasts destroy bone; Osteoclasts build bone. Were it not for this process no broken bone would ever heal.
Just like the ship, it is not the material that give you your identity , but the organisation of matter.

22

Like the skandas and all that. I get it. That’s one way of looking at what gives an individual ship it’s individual ship-ness. You could just as well say, “what gives a ship it’s individual ship-ness is the combination of a certain arrangement of it’s parts at a certain time and place with a certain name.” None of these answers seem more valid than the others. It just comes down to distinguishing between all ships, and this one ship and the way in which you choose to do it. There’s pros and cons to each way.

23

I have no idea of how this applies since the core of this so-called paradox presupposes that one is THERE to experience changes. Would you mind tying the ass hairs and the nose hairs together so a simple clod like me can get a scent of your “over the moon logic?” This nominal paradox wouldn’t exist on the “back side of the moon” since we can’t see it and there’s no one there to notice changes. Don’t know why but I felt it necessary to mention this fact.

24

It seems as if this is no longer a paradox, but a controversy, because of the 2000 years, which have come down since posing it. What it has come down to is, the linguistic/meaning and the perceptive/interpretive chasm has subsisted to the present time. The world is in this sense is as paradoxical, as Plotinus’ resurrection and Plato’s continuing relevance, in spite of all which went down with philosophy since the Enlightenment.

25

Two objects cannot be absolutely identical, thus when all parts of the ship are replaced, it cannot be the same ship anymore. Also every object carries an ‘information’. In case of the ship, the information is e.g. in the wood, coming from different trees. In case of human beings, the information is in the genes, the DNA, cells, etc. So if really all components are exchanged, the information changes as well.

26

Mithus, what if we look at 2 strains of DNA and they’re the same. Like identical twins? I agree they’re different because they exist in different places at the same time, but it’s important to note that they can have the same DNA. So you’ve got functionalism, reductionism, the type/token distinction. All these great concepts in the mix to confuse us back to the fact that there’s more than one way to skin this cat, but that none of them are perfect.

27

You’re right, the genetic information in the case of the identical twins is the same, but the information they get from their ambience and store in their brains is still different.

28 
Exactly,Reasonable.  If we look at the other side of the coin, the two identical ships, functionalism can immediately used to apply to basis of Leibniz' calculus,  the indiscernible.  The differences at the limit connect with the idea that it is not that the two ships be exactly identical, but they need only appear that way.  Reductionism and trait/type distinction need not even be considered at this level.DNA identification and ambience and information storage are the other side of the coin.
29

But the problem arises when trying to empirically verify, by looking at the brain state that the information is different. Both brains could appear identical in all ways other than location in space, because of functional similarities. The problem is best illustrated by giving two brains the same stimuli, then seeing different behaviors manifest. I’ll say, "HA! The brains, (according to this scan or whatever), are the same and the behaviors are different, so there’s more to it than just the functional mechanism. This is the crux of behavioral psychology. Everyone wants to believe that it’s all in the genes, or that it’s all physical, and while I can’t say that it’s not, it’s hard to explain different behavioral outcomes that stem from brains that are functionally identical and given the same stimuli.

30

So how does type/token relationships and reductionism used in this regard? Or is this beyond the intent and scope of the OP?

31

At root, the question is: what is identity?

What does it mean to be the same?
When reduced to a question of physical identity, the answer is usually obvious and trivial.

Plank for plank it is not the same ship, but it does retain a constant form and, I assume, the same functions and distinctness. It is only the latter that often matters to us, thus many people are likely to treat Theseus as the same ship, just as we think of people as having persistent identities over time though much of their physical body is not identical.

32 
 Perhaps even more reduced to a broader idea, how do universals prescribe recognition of particulars by which identities may be formed . How is a 'ship' recognized out of a myriad of floating things? Or what constitutes a ship?
33

Convention, Obe…convention. People just deciding by some nebulous, inexplicable manner to agree.

34

I mean to say that they drove each other’s cars (thing having different spirit), not their own, but without realizing, because the difference was very nominal.

with love,
sanjay

35 
 There are two ships, one the real, the other is a ,metaphor. Actually there are a lot of metaphors, as contrasted to the conventional ones, and we know convention how it is created by societal agreement, and that becomes very real.

  Among metaphorical ships there are many which come to mind are  two ships passing in the night, the ship of fools, the ghostly ship in fliegende hollander, titanic the great film, and all historical ships : the barge cleopatra sailed in, and in addition shipping as used in the modern vernicular , including shipping and receiving.  The convention has to specify what the ship is, as well, it is as broad as it can be, and reverting to the most basic meaning is the primary function of language, as You so rightly point out.

However, Plato points to a far wider scope  the question ,'what is a ship, or what is the good, or what is the beautiful or the just'  This signifying or trying to signify has been taken up by the postmoderns themselves, within a very much diminished context.  That is the problem with postmodern philosophy it's possible range may not accommodate a goal oriented vector analysis, because the goals cannot outsource the means.

But before i get carried away with over flourishing and over embellished seemingly presumptuously instructive type language, i will regain my footing and excuse this digression as my way of connecting to what i intended in the first place, the metaphoric ship.

The best ever, example for this , is the Flying Dutchman, the first Wagnerian Opera, one of the shortest.  This metaphoric ghostly journey, of intermittent stops to quasi real ports of call, to experience the need for a redemptive recurrent need for love, is almost the paradigm for the idea that reality (ports of call with real human objects of love) and the total metaphor of the cruelty and vagrancies of  the sea, at times at odds with each other.  It is in this sense the ghost and the human come in contact.  The ship, the metaphor is far more encompassing, to give an example  than the  pitifully short time we individually inhabit this world during our lifetime, and is almost pathetic compared with the 2000 years during which man has become aware of himself within the vast timeframe of history.  Later much later, to become aware of the cosmos as timeless,has been foreseen in antiquity, and in this sense, we lost this sense of wonder , due partly to the reductive way science reduced the primary vision to a conventional formula.  A German US philosopher, Marcuse during the heyday of new left in the sixties said as much in a book titled' 'One Dimensional Man.'

The extended point is, that Plato and his followers deserve a hearing, and conventional, linguistic interpretation may augment analysis of what a ship means, or on what basis two ships may be compared, but this does not get rid of the metaphor, the need, for not only functional, but the other two categories You brought up as the basis for comparison.

 The Flying Dutchman is Wagner's most optimistic opera, occasionally revealing an understanding of relationship between reality and fantasy, the old and the new, an effort to set up by need ,a synthesis, in order to avert a complete disassociation.  This is in vogue of the premiss that life imitates art, against which it has lost much of it's contest.
36

So you are saying that the cars have individual and distinct “spirits”. I would need to know what you mean by “spirit” in such a case.

It seems that the thinking has flowed into two concerns;

  1. Not everything can be absolutely identical (thus not the same ship).
  2. The discernible form and function is the same (thus is the same ship). I think this one includes the metaphor issue.

On the first issue, realize that literally every subatomic particle exchanges its inner components (in the form of ultra small tidbits of electromagnetic pulses). Very many of those components find their way into nearby particles. And this happens literally at the speed of light, continuously, and literally every fraction of a second. So if we are to say that the constituency has changed, therefore the object is different, then literally every second everything throughout the entire universe is an entirely new object.

Or in the case of a traffic slowdown on a highway, a “traffic jam”, the cars involved are exchanging and often the traffic jam migrates backward from the direction of the cars. So after a few minutes, is it the same traffic jam?

On the second issue, two identical marbles can easily be indistinguishable (or perhaps two hydrogen atoms). So if one gets exchanged with the other, have they actually not been exchanged merely because no one noticed? We could go into the actual functioning of the brain and mind in detail and see how it is that a mind functions and makes distinctions, recognition, memory, imagination, consciousness, illusion, delusion, and the ever insidious hypnosis, which would be an interesting discussion in itself, but is that really the issue?

Realize this is a question of “the truth of the situation”, not merely what someone has noticed or discerned. We are not talking about subjective identity, but objective reality.

So what is “the objective truth” regarding the ship or the cars?
And secondly (perhaps more relevant) is why is it that so very many people do not already well know the resolve to this kind of question?

37 
 Distinguishability or recognition versus function/form. James, do You see that the relationship issue here is the primary, regardless of which end you take this problem from?  The fact that you take it from point #1, says a lot of Your orientation as more toward recognition from the point of view of separating or differentiating the points of view?  This is classic induction.  

 The relationship issue for You between primary and secondary attributes, hence , is Your method of dealing with the paradox.  Now reasonable brought this out, by his reduction of the inductive method, into linguistic analysis of meaning, because of his view, that reduction into literal meaning is at crux here, and there is no way a 2000 year paradox can be solved inductively.

In my view, form and function of the dilemma are not the same, and this is why the other reduction into basic meaning takes the form of asking the question, as it may have been asked and attempted to be answered way back then. The reason this cannot be done is because, inductively the anti dialectical nature of inductive reasoning can not qualify all of the intervening variable formal steps (thesis anti thesis synthesis) which could qualify one step backwards from anther.  This steps could be only hypothesized by some sort of quantifiable formula, which could approximate the quality of all the backward steps from now, until the time when this paradox was written.  you might think thats not important, but minute qualitative aspects in reasoning missing regressively, may have meant a world of difference progressively, and if You would not agree with this, then we would only be looking at the flattened out, average-conventional hypothetical synthesis of intervening steps.
38

I am seriously not following you. I don’t see that deduction and induction have much at all to do with it and what “relationship” in particular are you speaking of?

39

The relationship between the literal source of the puzzle, and it’s current preoccupation with it. It is impossible, and improbable, that a correspondence between the referential truth behind the intent and the objective analysis(as set forth by those who wrote this paradox)can be found as it was intended, so hypothetically, going backwards in time, that intention of why make paradoxical an issue, which now, by now is a mute issue, not really paradoxical, is really at stake here. What is the object(ive) of the paradox, would, or could only be a hypothetically inductive narrative, because the original objective was of a formal sort. We can only try to understand that, and not fathom it.

 It is similar to my inquiring of  You, James, and asking You about Your forbearers, let's say going back more than 4 generations. What would it take to describe a maternal aunt say 80 generations ago?  This is a very ill fitting example, but that shows the complication about trying to argue against a backward flowing time.
40

So you are addressing, “Why bother to discuss the question” rather than answer either of the questions?